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Barence writes "HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allowing people to print from devices such as smartphones and tablets. The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own — or someone else's — printer. It will also let people more easily share physical documents; rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer. 'HP plans to offer a few of these new printers to consumers this month, and then a few more of the products to small businesses in September.'"

This is an obvious opportunity to have an open source alternative. A simple program to recieve email from any address the user wants and let them add a custom subject field "password" that allows them to print remotely.

The idea isn't that great but if there's an HP driver version compared to even the most basic OSS version with the actual options to avoid spam delivery then it's a good thing for us. Not saying that people will print more or that they need to print from a device that they carry with them anyway, but if HP thinks there's a market a quick programmer could show them up very easily.

that'd actually be pretty easy to set up, using a procmail filter on an incoming mail server. you can already filter by subject line and execute a command on the incoming e-mail if it matches a specified filter. coupled with something like fetchmail if you're not running your own mail server (or more likely, if your mail server isn't on the same network as your printer), you could easily write a set of filters and scripts that would redirect specific e-mails to a printer.:)

I did exactly this back in 1991 to deal with printing from a computer behind a two-way firewall with extremely restrictive permissions. The easiest protocol which was permitted through the firewall was email, and it automatically meant queueing was handled properly.

"Smarts" in the printer?!?! No, sir - this featurette will be part of the wonderful HP Driver & Utility package, now available on a single disk thanks to BluRay technology. It'll run from your PC. And when I say PC, I mean the one you basically 'give' to the HP drivers.

Most network printers afaict default to accepting print jobs and even adminitstration control from anyone who can directly connect to them. Usually this isn't too much of a problem because home users and small buisnesses are usually on NATed networks and larger companies hopefully have someone who knows what they are doing.

These printers OTOH presumablly connect outbound to some HP controlled server that accepts emails on thier behalf. That means if HP don't get this right they could be very vulerable to at

A previous car of mine stopped running the day after its warranty expired. Coincidence? While taking that loooong walk home I stopped by the post office, and would you believe I had an advertisement to buy a brand new car from the same dealership and a "really great deal on ANY trade in, just drive or push it in" for $$$ off the new car price. I replaced the 'computer module' with an after market unit and drove it for 7 more years. You can guess how much future business they got from me.

There was the run a while back where somebody discovered the admin page for large industrial printers could be easily searched to find unprotected panels, and that print jobs could be remotely administered... how many million pages of unsavory imagery were printed for the next day or two is anybody's guess...

Still, with a whitelist you'd have to know a valid sender. It's by no means foolproof, but it's a tremendous improvement over nothing at all. Well, until you get your email account hacked and spam harvesters know that you@gmail.com has the following three @myhpprinter.com (or whatever) email addresses in its address book.

That being said, if they just run everything through gmail's spam filter, it would probably be fine. That thing is absurdly accurate - at least in my experience.

One of the other addresses in the address book of your mom's (or boss's or client's) infected computer? Or maybe your mom's (or boss's or client's) own address.

You're right that they likely don't have your whitelist addresses if they just found your email publicly posted on a website like slashdot. If they somehow got your address from another person's infected computer the odds are a bit higher that they can find a whitelisted address.

So they can find *a* whitelisted address... maybe. And once they have my mom's email address, I can take her off the whitelist. I can call her and say "Yo mom, fix your shit."

But generally the problem with whitelists is not that spammers are clever enough to spoof whitelisted addresses. The real problem with whitelists is that we all get a lot of email from random unexpected sources, so we usually can't only allow whitelisted email in. A whitelist on a printer like this would probably work fairly well, since you don't want it to receive print jobs from unexpected sources.

WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER We noticed that you are running low on black toner

WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONERWe noticed that you are running low on black tonerWE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONERWe noticed that you are running low on black tonerWE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONERWe noticed that you are running low on black tonerWE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONERWe noticed that you are running low on black tonerWE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONERWe noticed that you are running low on black t

Is whitelisting even necessary? I'm no networking guru, but I can permit or deny internet access, in either direction, on any port(s) or protocol(s), for any machine on my network. Give me one of those silly printers. I'll wrap that bad boy up, snug as a bug in a rug. And, Wireshark will quickly find out if I missed anything, like a "phone home" feature.

Understandable though. You approached it like an IT person. Now go to the wall, bang your head against it furiously 10 times in a row and consider the USER. Banging your head just helps you think like one.

The user will not care about white listing or security, or any other reasonable consideration we can come up with in 60 seconds on/. about this ridiculously, deliciously, stupid idea.

This was a marketing exec over at HP that thought of a cool feature and ra

If by 'Real nerds' you mean 'wankers who like to deliberately use less-common (sometimes obsolete) and more confusing terms just to gain some sense of self-importance by explaining themselves and (un)correcting people all the time', then yes.

But I would wager that most 'Real nerds', when installing such a package on their system (you probably use the term "Winchester Disk" here), would refer to a package by the name they look it up with. Otherwise, keeping track of all the forking and renaming would be rather hard on one's memory. Oh, sorry, I mean to say "core", like your Real Nerd (TM) would.

We know how widely the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) [wikipedia.org] on port 631 is used; just because it implements access control, authentication, and encryption, avoiding the inevitable spam problem makes it much better for this purpose than any kludge using email protocols. If we could only teach the crew at geek squad to set it up and teach the clueless users how to use it, we'd be much better off.

Your post has given me an excellent idea. We create a line of printers containing a small bomb, set to explode after a predetermined time. We advertise this as a feature, but use lots of buzzwords. A short while later, we eliminate the market of people who buy stupid things because they contain buzzwords. Companies will then have to market their products to the survivors by providing actual features.

This could have been amazing ten years ago... but printers as a technology on the whole seem to be dying out to me. I knew fewer people that have them, as there is very little that needs to be printed anymore.

I dunno, I found new used for plotters [xyron.com] recently, and combined with a color printer, I can do new stuff I didn't think about before. I've been making stencils to do wood working. I've also made some stencils for my roommates cakes. Using an inkjet printer, we can substitute the ink cartridges for food coloring cartridges and print onto sugar paper or fondant (very thin). Can also make game pieces using the cutter/plotter and using a laser printer to print onto sticky paper.

There is context to what HP is doing. It has to do with smart phones that take pictures but doesn't have built in printing capability. Form what have read, this has lead people to look at pictures but not print them. Sure there are solutions, but they are not really 'plug and play'. If it is hard to print, HP does not sell ink.

Recall what the printer manufacturers did when everyone started taking digital pictures. They put memory slots in the printer and software that would one-touch print the various picture formats. This was nothing that technical people would use, we all had computer with photo editing suites and high end printers, but for the mom wanting to print pictures of the kids is was a great way to sell ink.

This is all that is happening now. Someone has some snaps on their smart phone or feature phone with email. They want to print it but they don't really want to mess with the computer. They don't have a memory card that will work with the old printer. They don't want to go the marketplace and download the app and set up the printer. So they email. It works. One touch plug and play printing. They use ink that HP sells.

The other context to this is that ten years ago houses were not networked the way they are now, and network kit was not so cheap. Ten years ago a card or box to network a printer wold be north of $200, and a networked printer would be north of $1000. Now HP sells a network ready printer for $100 and most houses have a ethernet port to plug it into.

I was thinking the same. Each printer (including the small desktop models) at my work can be emailed to and from, which works excellent with printing, scanning and faxing (receiving and sending). I've seen the same printers for sale at normal consumer shops...

If I understand correctly though, it will have a preconfigured, easy to set up web-based email adress om a HP server. Basically bringing the normal enterprise functionality to home users.

Now, you'll get a print out from your printer telling you you're out of ink and at the bottom will be a coupon you can cut out... Note: the coupon will be white lettering on a black background and will probably take an entire 8x11 sheet of paper...

great, another 50MB of bloat on top of the 95MB they currently cram down your throat and insist on updating daily. With their own proprietary update scheduler. For something that requires maybe 20K of actual code, if any.

You can blame MS for that. They were after all the ones that popularized the neutered overpriced "designed for Windows" hardware, which was a real piece of hardware with a couple chips removed so that they required Windows only software to work.

You can blame MS for that. They were after all the ones that popularized the neutered overpriced "designed for Windows" hardware, which was a real piece of hardware with a couple chips removed so that they required Windows only software to work.

While obviously Microsoft popularized it in the specific "designed for Windows" form in, as I recall, the Win95/NT4-era, I think that the concept of offloading functions from peripherals to software running on the workstation the peripheral was serving as a measure which both saves costs and ties the peripheral to a specific operating system predates its use by Microsoft -- NeXT, for instance, did the same thing with its Canon-manufactured laser printers, as I recall.

Dunno about the HP printers used in large firms, but for the networked ones I've used, I can typically just telnet in to change the config, and jobs are magickally printed, without or without CUPS, but certainly without installing a boatload of management software. The one I use at home (an old 4090N) is easier to use and far less trouble than those ubiqitous plastic blue boxes with a Linksys logo that everyone uses. And certainly more reliable.

Yes, there are many possible problems with spam, etc. But at least they are using an open standard: email. Perhaps IPP might be better. This means any email user (including any smart phone user) can print which is kinda cool.

For starters this isn't exactly new. It might be new to consumer grade crapware printers, but I believe I setup a Canon office copier that had the ability to receive emails and print them approximately 8 years ago.

Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.

Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.

Because low quality prints are fine for old people who can't tell the difference. This is the sort of thing that will probably keep some guy's inlaws from pestering him on a weekly basis if they can just get their hands on recent pics of the grandkids without having to work that dang mouse.

For starters this isn't exactly new. It might be new to consumer grade crapware printers, but I believe I setup a Canon office copier that had the ability to receive emails and print them approximately 8 years ago.

I bet people did this in the 1980s.
A simple mail-to-printer gateway takes thirty seconds or so to set up in Unix.
(But why do it? The line printer spooler protocol was in use already in the early 1980s).

I came here to post this question: What could possibly go wrong?
And discovered that just about everybody else had exactly the same reaction. There were two or three responses that at first glance seemed to think this was a good idea, then I read them closer and realized they were being sarcastic.

You have to watch those guys. One day they're innocently printing email so that managers will be able to read it, the next they're urgently requesting your assistance in confidential financial matters.

By ensuring your ink cartridges are changed regularly, we can help make sure your ink will always be fresh. At HP we're making it easier for empty out those old, crusty ink cartridges by printing all your attachments for you. At the same time we're keeping your ink fresh, we're also helping you uphold your document retention policy by automatically generating hard copies of all your email!

I've had a HP printer that instead of giving me a useful error when things didn't work just failed with a "Nope, that didn't work" error.(Oops, I turned off the guest account when printing over the network.) My brother had an HP printer with scanning functionality but the scanning software had a bug where it would always crash on a scan of the last page. (This was apparently a common issue and last I heard it still hasn't been fixed.) So now they're going to have a printer that uses software so you can e-ma

From the company with the most expensive and most annoying cartridges on the market. Its a shyster move to try to sell more HP ink products to the stupider members of the business community, not a well needed and clever feature.

Exactly my first thought. Then I thought, HP *must* be doing something to add some security so that only the owner, and friends/relatives specifically authorized by the owner, can send emails to the printer. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but nobody wants to waste $500+/mo on inkjet ink (which we all know is one of the most expensive substances in the world) and paper to print spam.

I doubt they'd require users to use public-key cryptography to verify their identity, but at the very least, they could

CUPS supports three different printing protocols over TCP (which means, over the Internet). IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), for example, is ten years old, and it supports access control, authentication, and encryption.